Executive Summary

With ScienceLogic, Kellogg Company was able to dramatically increase the monitoring coverage of both their legacy and public cloud based infrastructures, while also cutting costs by over $2 million across a five year period.

The Challenge–Mounting Cost of Operations and Lack of Hybrid IT Support

Lacked monitoring support for hybrid IT environments.

More than $10 million required to retool current monitoring solution to meet needs.

The Solution–Moving from A Legacy Based Framework Tool to a Hybrid IT Monitoring Platform.

Cut operational costs with a next generation monitoring solution.

Use a product focused on hybrid IT environments

The Results–500% Increase in Devices Monitored While Saving over $2 Million

Estimated savings of over $2 million across the next 5 years.

Expanded monitoring of infrastructure elements by over 500%.

Background

Kellogg Company, a leading provider of ready-to-eat cereal and convenience foods, is headquartered in Battle Creek, Michigan. Their product line consists of such products as Raisin Bran, Frosted Flakes, Cheez-Its, and Eggo Waffles. Kellogg grosses well over $14 billion in revenue, and is a member of the Fortune 500.

The Challenge–Mounting Cost of Operations and Lack of Hybrid IT Support

All activities at Kellogg Company are focused on one primary objective: delivering the best quality end products to consumers. In line with this motto, the Kellogg IT department was seeking ways they could focus on competitive differentiators they deliver to the rest of the business. After careful deliberation, they decided a “cloud first” strategy was the most appropriate strategy for their organization, and began deploying new workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Their move to a hybrid IT model presented several challenges, one primary challenge was monitoring an environment split across Kellogg’s datacenters and AWS. Their existing IT operations management solution did not provide monitoring for both onsite and AWS based resources. Further, it did not provide the flexibility their team needed to discover and monitor elements that appear and disappear in moments within a cloud-based environment.

Additionally, Kellogg had plans to expand their monitoring coverage to all locations across the globe. Estimates of using their current ITOM platform to provide this capability were in excess of $10 million, requiring a full time staff of over 10 skilled technicians (a 5-fold increase in FTE requirements simply to administer their current product) and the need to support the multiple integrations needed to make the different parts of the current platform work together.

The Solution–Moving from A Legacy Based Framework Tool to a Hybrid IT Monitoring Platform

Knowing that to support a hybrid IT environment as well as expand their coverage across the globe without the burden of excessive costs, they would need to find a new solution, Brian Amaro, Senior Architect Infrastructure Analytics for Kellogg Company, set out on a 3-month odyssey to find the best hybrid IT monitoring platform available today. “I did an analysis of 25 distinct vendors comparing 100 different capabilities and 100 separate security concerns,” said Brian. “After the completion of the analysis, I put the top 3 providers in a weighted average spreadsheet hiding their names, to ensure an unbiased result.”

“The reality was, it wasn’t possible to fix monitoring here at Kellogg, with the current tool we had and the budget we had to work with,” continued Brian. “I knew there had to be a better way. Turns out, there is, ScienceLogic.”

Brian and team were looking for a monitoring platform that, beyond supporting their hybrid IT needs, could provide separate dashboards to individual contributors, dramatically reduce their costs, proactively alert when potential problems were approaching, and significantly cut the time it took to perform root cause detection.

“From a capabilities perspective, it was clear ScienceLogic was head and shoulders above the competition,” said Brian. “As an example, no solution on the market could match ScienceLogic’s coverage for Amazon Web Services. But beyond the product’s capabilities, the company staff (from the support level all the way to the CEO) are unparalleled. It was obvious the company and the product were built by people who had been in my shoes and intimately knew infrastructure monitoring and hybrid IT.”

The Results–500% Increase in Devices Monitored While Saving over $2 Million

Using ScienceLogic’s platform, Kellogg Company was able to achieve something that wasn’t possible with their current legacy ITOM platform. They increased their monitoring coverage for their infrastructure by a sizeable 500% all while setting themselves up to save over $2 million in software costs across the next 5 years.

“Beyond capabilities, financials were a big driver for this initiative,” said Stover Mcllwain, Senior Director of Infrastructure for Kellogg Company. “We performed a deep financial analysis to justify our decision to move to ScienceLogic’s next generation platform. From simply evaluating it with regard to profit and loss up to calculating the net present value, it was clear that ScienceLogic would drive a huge cost savings for our IT Operations team.”

Today Kellogg is able to monitor their entire IT environment, both onsite and offsite in AWS, from one solution, with 1/5 of the staff that would have been required with the legacy solution. They can also benefit from the new ability to automatically detect the dependencies that exist between their AWS based resources and their onsite resources.

“We’re running a highly efficient operation here,” said Brian Amaro. “ScienceLogic not only saves us considerable costs and resources, but also acts as a catalyst and enabler of our migration to Amazon Web Services. We can automatically discover, map, and apply the right monitoring policies to resources as they are deployed into AWS. Beyond that, we have a product that is much more intuitive and simple to use freeing up our technical efforts to drive even more business value across other projects.”

About Kellogg Company

The Kellogg Company was founded in 1898 when founder W. K. Kellogg and his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, accidentally flaked wheat berry—a mistake that would result in the recipe for Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The company, which is headquartered in Battle Creek, Michigan, now operates in 180 countries, providing ready-to-eat cereals and other food products. Its 2013 reported net sales totaled $14.8 billion. Kellogg’s brands include Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Special K, Rice Krispies, Pop Tarts, Eggo Waffles, Nutri-Grain Bars, and of course, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.